Resurrecting Vijaya Kumaratunga

I am not a political writer. I doubt that the worth of a man, ANY man, can be reduced to his political merits. Legacies are framed by the larger than life, that is whatever injects a superhuman, supra-mundane quality into the lives being assessed. Politicians and individuals tend to come and go, but even among them you find names which remain cherished long after death, although the cause for that cherishment may not be (and I say this bluntly) because of their political signature.

Vijaya Kumaratunga would have been 70 today, were he alive. Like all magnetic personalities, he remains loved even by those who continue to question his political positions. That he was shot and killed didn’t mar his image. Not by a long shot. Why?

Vijaya was “one of us”, for one thing. He was not the kind of actor who “strayed”. He had his notions of acting and my guess is that not everyone favoured them. He had his highs and lows, moments when he perched up high and moments when the films he was in seemed to deteriorate badly. There’s a gap between “Thushara” and “Baddegama”, after all, both of which featured him. It’s to Vijaya’s credit, however, that he didn’t seem to care. He came, he acted, and he won crowds. Even when he was down, he courted audiences. Few actors can claim to such an achievement. Very few.

I admit I don’t know much about acting. Where’s the line to be drawn between artifice and honesty, between performances that pulsate with life and those which seem cut off from reality? It’s hard to measure, harder to conclude. With what I’ve seen, however, I can say this much about Vijaya: even in his worst performances, he was down to earth. And in his best performances – in “Hanthane Kathawa”, “Diyamanthi”, and of course the films of Dharmasena Pathiraja – he was hardy and formidable. To the hilt.

What else was there to this remarkable man? He didn’t pretend. He didn’t exaggerate, he didn’t flaunt (although he could), and he kept himself restrained enough for us to blend in with whatever character he played. Dharmasena Pathiraja used him well in this regard, not because he was a “star” who could refine his stories but because he could relate to the milieu Pathiraja went for: the urbanised and dispossessed, cut off from familial bonds and awaiting an uncertain future. It seemed that with Vijaya, every nuance and shade of emotion that the unemployed and dispossessed faced was captured. Excellently.

He failed, I think, when he tried to play characters set against a different milieu. He wasn’t convincing in Tissa Abeysekera’s “Karumakkarayo”, even less so as Babun in “Baddegama”. Vijaya was born in Ja-Ela, near the coastal belt. He could only have been at home with the community he grew up with, not surprisingly.

But wherever he was, he needed to be the hero. That was important. If he couldn’t save the day, if he couldn’t turn back and smile or frown at the closing chapter of every story he was in, we wouldn’t have relished that story.

Directors knew this. That’s why they featured him as the "saviour". Always.

There was another thing: his voice. He sang and sang well, and every time he performed, he broke out with a voice that exemplified suffering and patience. No wonder these songs captured our hearts so well, even when they were politically coloured.

Of his political career there’s little I can say. Whether he could have split the opposition vote in the 1988 election is a question not even prophets can answer, but that probably would have happened with or without Vijaya. He kept to his positions, he articulated them sleekly, and he courted enough and more fans who loved the man even if they didn’t vote for him. Whether this was enough, and more pertinently whether he would have injected into his presidency the same charisma and exuberance which epitomised his acting career, hence, are questions I’m not fit to answer.

On February 16, 1988, he was shot and killed outside his own residence. By that time he had taken part in a film which played him out as a villain, a rapist who seduces his own sister-in-law. I haven’t seen Vasantha Obeyesekere’s “Kadapathaka Chaya” in a long time, and I have been told that it took some time for audiences to adjust to this character, but I remember seeing a distasteful, yet suave and urbane, villain in him. He could have diversified his career and become more versatile, perhaps.

We’ll never know, of course. We can only guess.

Since his death we’ve been seeing stars take to politics. Almost all of them have succeeded, and some of them survive thanks to the films and TV series they’re in. None of them can claim to Vijaya Kumaratunga’s fame, though, of this I’m certain. Maybe it’s because Vijaya was the first real "political star" we had. Yes, we had Gamini Fonseka before him, but Fonseka was of a different mould, allied to a totally different political ideology. Besides, by the time Fonseka had become a statesman-like actor Vijaya had garnered fame. That fame was unparalleled.

I know of people who love him and hate his politics. I know of people who celebrate him, even though they are diametrically opposed to his ideology. That’s a given. The best stars, after all, aren’t marred by their personal predilections. The best stars survive despite them. In Vijaya we lost that kind of star, and since that day in 1988 I know the rest of the country, of my generation and generations that came before it, feel the same way. Telling, I should think.

Written for: The Island LIFESTYLE, February 21 2016

Reflections on the lyrics of Sunil Ariyaratne

About four months ago, I sat down for an interview with Bandula Nanayakkarawasam. We moved on to his life and the various anecdotes that coloured it, including his first trysts with music and poetry. A few minutes later however, we began talking about the true purpose of the lyric, in terms of artistry and social discourse.

I then asked him two questions: “What do you think about the gap between the political and the aesthetic in poetry? Does this gap belittle the political versifiers?”

He gave his answer slowly, but with conviction: “There is a gap, but this doesn’t belittle those who take to the political. If at all, this empowers them.” Inevitably, we began talking about that foremost writer of the political lyric, Professor Sunil Ariyaratne.

Nanayakkarawasam may not have been a political lyricist, but what he said about Ariyaratne and his verses that day offers an antidote to those who view his (Ariyaratne’s) political phase as having been regressive. Nanayakkarawasam drove his point home well: “I may not be able or willing to indulge in the political with what I write, but that doesn’t diminish my respect for him.” Apt.

Sunil Ariyaratne’s achievement, which he sustained right until the end of “Pavana”, was his ability at undermining the popular conception of reality by directly disclosing that reality. As with William Blake’s most mature poetry, his strength came out when he deftly played around with the opposition between what was real and what was popularly perceived, often to the point of irony (and even caricature).

This comes out remarkably well in “Sakura Mal Pipila”, which precedes his political phase. But it is in such apolitical songs like “Perahera Enawa” that he is at his best. I can listen to the opening lyrics to that even now and be moved by how deftly he undresses what’s perceived (as per tradition) to disclose what’s hidden beneath:

පෙරහැර එනවා කස පුපුරනවා
        හෙවිසි හඩ පතුරනවා
        කසකරුවන්ගේ දහඩිය මුගුරින්
        පාවඩ මග අතුරනවා...

The first two lines are pitted directly against the second two: the magnificence of the kasakaraya’s antics is directly at odds with the (silent) exploitation of him during the pageant. There’s irony here alright. But Ariyaratne isn’t content with bringing out his social concern at once: he moves on deftly, dwelling on the elephant and children paraded around the perahera and the nilame who snobbishly ignores the “podi minisun” (the little men) around him, before launching an acerbic attack:

අඹු දරුවන්නේ කුස් පුරවන්නයි
        වන්නම් තාළ වයන්නේ...
        වේල දෙවේලට අත සරුවෙන්නයි
        කොහොඹකලේ නටවන්නේ...

When I listen to “Perahera Enawa”, I am reminded of Blake’s “I Saw a Chapel” – it begins with “I saw a chapel all of gold” and ends with “And laid me down among the swine”, turning from the illusorily mystical to the bitterly real. This is probably what distinguishes Ariyaratne the Social Revolutionary from Ariyaratne the Political Revolutionary, something evident even in his most political verses from “Sathyaye Geethaya”.

I know people who think that these two rubbished tradition rather unforgivably, but to me this reflects a puritanical attitude to what’s traditional and what’s not. That Ariyaratne dwelt on the lesser known aspects of a pageant certainly reveals the fact that those who take part in it do sweat and toil for the sake of a nilame perched atop an elephant (isn’t that what all pageants amount to, anyway?). One can glean this from the introduction to the song that Malini reads out: “This is not a perahera that you and I have been accustomed to seeing.”

Ariyaratne has his champions from this period, but I’m not so sure whether one can say the same of “Pavana”. In “Pavana” he became a political revolutionary, and he turned from Blake’s subtle demystifications to attacking political structures more directly. He wasn’t as concerned about the opposition between reality and illusion as he used to be, hence: for him, what was “out there” and directly perceivable was what counted. This came out forcibly even in his most poignant lyrics, as with “Yadamin Banda Wilangu La”, which explains how he differentiated “Pavana” from his earlier work.

The songs of “Pavana” were dedicated to those affected and killed by the state during the bheeshanaya. The crimes perpetrated against them were “hidden away”, yes. But we didn’t need Sunil Ariyaratne or Nanda Malini to tell us that, because while those crimes may have been belittled by the state, that didn’t conceal the fact that everyone knew what it was committing in the name of erasing dissent.

What these two achieved in “Pavana”, therefore, was a twist on what they used to do in “Sathyaye Geethaya”: instead of pitting reality against illusion, they unearthed a reality that everyone knew about and transformed it into poetry. This was the period when Malini refused to sing of love and life, when she and Ariyaratne gave their fiercest, most politically direct work, to their listeners. Those listeners were the people. The oppressed.

The most common criticism made of these songs today isn’t that they were too political, but that they were framed in such a way that they fail to transcend their specificity. In other words, they were framed by the period before and during the bheeshanaya: their relevance, hence, is limited to this period. What this implies (condescendingly) is that they were crafted so directly that they can’t be classed as “timeless”. The most popular counterargument to this is to claim that “timelessness” is a “bourgeois” and elitist conception (as certain Marxist critics are wont to assert at times). But that would be giving into a fallacy and to contort what defines timelessness.

No work of art purports to transcend spatiotemporal constraints as and when it’s created. D. H. Lawrence’s dictum that poetry amounts to “the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment” can probably be said of ANY art-form: the creator/author of the work of art records “the moment” in a form accessible to others. This is as true for Nanda Malini’s “Dedunu Paya” as it is for “Mongoliyanuwane”, never mind that the former was about love and the latter about multiculturalism.

The best works of art aren’t framed with reference to the present, hence. Not all the time. The lyricist crafts his verses (wittingly or not) in a way that their specificity IN ITSELF resists narrow interpretation and becomes “timeless”. We still quote Blake’s “The Tyger” (“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night”), but that doesn’t stop us from considering his more socially conscious poems as relevant for OUR TIME. The way I see it, this is the best defence anyone can make of Sunil Ariyaratne’s political lyrics, the same lyrics which could talk of injustice with these lines:

පොලිසිය උන්ගේ කූඩුව අපෙ උන්ගේ...
        නීතිය උන්ගේ හිරබත අපෙ උන්ගේ...

(The police is theirs, the prison ours
The law is theirs, the prison food ours)

Yes, there’s specificity here, direct and to the point despite the metaphor. But to consider this a reason to rubbish these songs would be stretching things too far. I like Nanda Malini’s earlier phase (when she sang “Me Sinhala Apage Ratai”), but her later disavowal of that phase is reason for commendation, not critique: to have drawn herself away from singing about love was an act of courage. Much of this must be credited to Ariyaratne, of course, because inasmuch as Malini articulated his lyrics with conviction, those lyrics could have only been written by someone of Ariyaratne’s calibre.

What happened after “Pavana” was a little tragic but inevitable. Radicals tend to age and change, most often into reactionaries: Wordsworth deteriorated, for instance, with his poems celebrating the rural way of life and the sonnets on the English Church after becoming a turncoat, while Coleridge faded away a little while later pretty much along the same lines.

But Ariyaratne didn’t become reactionary. He became obscurantist. I know I’m being a little cruel here, but that’s what some of the songs he penned during this time force me to think.

Sometimes, as with “Seegiri Geeyak” (which was lambasted for its “frivolity”), he writes of love and life in nonconformist, provocative ways. Sometimes, as with “Rata Karawanta Nam”, he embraces the satirist who won us with “Sakura Mal Pipila”. And sometimes, as with “Gata Gata Awidin” and “Gumu Gumuwa Wadule”, he dwells on a silliness that borders on nonsense. He lost his grip with the latter kind of these songs. Not hard to see why.

There’s a silly undertone that runs throughout their lyrics, but Ariyaratne’s problem isn’t that. His problem is that he purposely refrains from justifying that silliness, instead letting it overwhelm us.

This is what accounts for the jumbled up quirk that was “Nona”, a song which in all likelihood was an experiment based on how many variations of the “na” sound a singer can play around with: an experiment that (obviously) failed. A music critic once told me that in this period, form outpaced content, and Ariyaratne’s lyrics became little more than exercises in aestheticism. There were songs he wrote which still echo the “Sathyaye Geethaya” period, granted, which mercifully weren’t and aren’t a minority.

I doubt a single article can do justice to Sunil Ariyaratne. What he’ll churn out in the coming years won’t dent his reputation as probably the most unparalleled exponent of the political song in this country, to whom the non-English speaking section of this country owes a large debt. Together with Nanda Malini, he educated my parents’ generation with the truism that a song (or any other work of art, for that matter) needn’t always be preoccupied with the aesthetic, and that what’s illusory can be undermined deftly, not with swords and guns, but with verses and lines.

For that and for all those lyrics, hence, we are grateful. Always were, always will be.

Written for: The Island LIFESTYLE, February 21 2015

H. U. Thibbotumunuwe’s ‘Adventures in Steam’

Review of H. U. Thibbotumunuwe’s ‘Adventures in Steam: British Era’, published in 2012

When H. U. Thibbotumunuwe writes about train journeys, he writes well. He’d do better to paint, one feels, not because his prose is uneven and disjointed but because he extracts from memory so precisely that he injects an almost painterly nostalgia in page after page. He wrote two books on his adventures, one in 2012 and another two years later. He wrote from the heart, he wrote from memory, and he won an audience. For those who love train rides and train history, and for those who love revisiting the past, these two books are (without a doubt) essential reading.

“Adventures in Steam: British Era” is the first of the two. It recounts almost everything he underwent as driver and inspector in the Ceylon Government Railway, from the day he joined in 1942 the day he retired many, many decades later. He clearly isn’t content in just recounting (notwithstanding the fact that he calls his book a “narration”), but for a book of this sort to be replete with history-anecdote and reportage, he must narrate. Not editorialise.

That’s not to say that he doesn’t offer comment. But where he does (and towards the end of the book he moves frequently into commentary), it helps us consider him not just as another history-transcriber but a transcriber who has lived through what he has written. As such he doesn’t remain fixated on either nostalgia or bitterness, though he’s had his lion’s share of both. There are chapters here which dwell on a harsh reality, exposing the exploitative nature of the colonialist-managed Railway days (right from the first chapter), and there are chapters which personify a happiness and sense of camaraderie that existed despite that harsh reality (he evokes this best, I feel, when he describes a get-together in Chapter 19).

Sometimes (and this is Thibbotumunuwe at his best) he mingles reality and bitterness, offering irony for the reader. So it is with Chapter 20 (“T. C de Silva Who Was Not a Garrat), where he narrates the account of a driver who refuses a double turn and justifies that refusal by saying that he isn’t a garret and that “even Garrats have to be refuelled for a return journey.” “Although Silva’s stand is a glaring fact, one must have the guts to act in that manner,” Thibbotumunuwe writes, and we agree. The author evokes humour here when he reports what de Silva offered as justification, humour of the bitter, acerbic sort.

I don’t know what it would’ve been like to work in the Railway then and I don’t know what it’s like now. It’s to Thibbotumunuwe’s credit that he takes time to explain and clarify, so much so that we know what he’s telling us. We aren’t confused, his prose elaborates, and it remains lean and austere (for the most). He is the best person who can achieve this, and the only person, given that he might well be the oldest living railway pensioner in the country. And so we read his take on the aforementioned “Garrat” trains, which spans no less than three chapters. There are technicalities here, and he throws the jargon of his trade to the reader. But this jargon isn’t flowery. It’s digestible. The author gets his reader to read on.

Towards the end however, he gets more sober and reflective. In “Death on the Pilgrim Special” he spares frill and reports the death of a colleague, which (one can argue) deprives it of any sense of horror and compassion. But that’s what Thibbotumunuwe indulges in and privileges: he doesn’t let emotion colour his narrative. Death was a cruel inevitability along the railway line, he seems to be telling us.

What we glean from these chapters is probably the most honest account of the railway which existed back then: gruelling, death-defying, and sometimes life-denying. But we never question the author’s judgment, for his judgment remains analytical and content despite whatever bias or prejudice we may be having. As with all innovations that history brought up, the railway in its infancy was both morbid and invigorating. Thibbotumunuwe doesn’t admit this straight away (he does so a little in his second book), but what he provides us is enough for us to make our own conclusions.

I enjoy train-rides and I enjoy reading about train-rides. There’s so much in our railway’s history that both the historian and storyteller can indulge in. Being well acquainted with his trade, Thibbotumunuwe no doubt has provided all that he can, penning it down for our generation to go through and reflect on. I don’t know what other readers will feel after reading it, but I’m sure that almost all of them would feel humbled by those death-defying days, when train-rides weren’t just a luxury but a luxury that drove on blood and sweat (almost literally).

In short, “Adventures in Steam: British Era” is something the common reader can flip through easily. It was prescribed and recommended as a school library book, wise considering how much in terms of history it contributes. I loved going through it, I’m sure others will too, and I’m sure they’ll all wish the author long life and wish that he will follow this (and the book that followed) with other accounts of the Railway Service, which subsisted once upon a harsher time.

Written for: The Island LIFESTYLE, February 14 2016

The 'poetess' who wrote on film

Some time back I watched Loku Duwa on TV. The film ran for more than two hours, but like all good films which run for that long, it didn’t sag. It tells the story of Punna (Geetha Kumarasinghe in one of her better roles), the eldest daughter in a middle-class family, who (as per tradition) sacrifices much for her siblings and gets little to nothing in return.

She’s then nearly married to a man she herself loves (played by Jackson Anthony), but he turns out to be a thief. Predictably, given that the marriage was announced everywhere, she loses her dignity, and in the end has to kowtow to a lascivious womaniser (played to perfection by Gamini Fonseka), who also happens to be the father of one of her school-friends.

I liked it. The story could have been turned into a melodrama, but mercifully it wasn’t. Geetha Kumarasinghe acted in probably her most powerful role, a point complemented by the fact that she produced it (watching it made me wish she acted in more films like that). But above all, I loved the way she was scripted: not as a woman who succumbs nor as a woman who rebels and wins everything in an obviously manufactured ending, but as a sufferer who endures and in the end (poignantly) resolves for a better tomorrow. Then again this was a film directed by Sumitra Peries, and Sumitra, as those who’ve relished her work more than me know, has a way of narrating her stories, a way of offering sympathy for her characters.

Last year I wrote on Sumitra, and I commented that she had filmed the joys and sorrows of our mothers, wives, and daughters more than any other director in this country. I still stand by this, notwithstanding the tirades levelled against her by critics who (not always unjustifiably, I must add) felt that she presented those mothers, wives, and daughters as stoics, who take in everything they are forced to undergo as torment. But, one can argue, if this remains the only legitimate way of representing our women, what’s the harm in depicting them that way?

I liked Loku Duwa as much as I liked Gehenu Lamayi. There too, the woman doesn’t win. She loses, but it is in how she accepts, affirms, and faces loss that moves us. I’m sure there were people who demarcated her as “bourgeois”, as with Lester her husband, thanks to this. But in terms of honesty of treatment and fidelity to life, I doubt that I've seen women (as victims, that is) represented more daringly than in her work. Speaks well of her prowess.

She was and is considered a "poetess", someone who felt for the cinema the same way a versifier would for his or her poetry. I’m sure that term captures quite a lot of what she has stood for, as filmmaker and human being, but I’m not so sure whether (in the hands of disparagers) it can be taken up and used to demote her. No, I’m not saying that the term views her work condescendingly, but a perusal of her work will convince anyone that to view her as a “poetess”, someone whose conception of women on film was “freakish” and “quirky”, would be incongruous and unjust. Would they criticise the novels of the Bronte sisters by the same token?

Like her husband, Sumitra didn’t make a great many films. But like all great artists, she’s remembered for each and every one of them. Right until she made Yahaluwo in 2007 and moved her canvas, she narrated her plot-lines fluently, with ease. This fluency can’t be written about or described. It can only be watched. There’s poetry in here, indescribable but beautifully austere, and in the end we give ourselves up to the rhythm and flow of her stories. Few directors can claim such a quality. Very few.

I remember talking with her once, about two years ago, and the conversation inevitably trailed off to film tastes. Sumitra loved the humanists, just like Lester, and she told me about the film that moved her the most: Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. For those of you who haven’t seen it, Dreyer’s Joan (and I say this bluntly) represented Sumitra’s conception of womanhood, at once tormented and persistent. When I watched Punna crying at her mother (Irangani Serasinghe) in Loku Duwa, right after she realises that her dignity is lost thanks to her fiancée’s duplicity, I was reminded of Dreyer’s Joan. Aptly.

I’m not suggesting that Sumitra was another Dreyer, of course. She had her own stories to tell. She lived and worked at a time when filmmakers didn’t relegate the plot to the dust and held the script in high regard. There was no sloppiness or quick cutting back then. You moved with the films and stories you watched. There was no need for fast pacing, if at all because back then, even in the harshest circumstances, we lived in a more carefree world.

Not that she wasn’t conscious of a need to change. She tried her hand at depicting a different woman in Yahalu Yeheli. The film was convincing, but its ending evoked a sense of triumphalism that was nearly provocative and a little too idealised. When she made her next film three years later, hence, she returned to her usual niche. And when she did, she made just about the most beatifying and powerfully intense film I’ve seen in this country.

Sagara Jalaya was her apotheosis, the kind of film one comes across very rarely. I still can’t forget the ending to that masterpiece, when the boy writes a letter to his uncle in town for a job, his way of relieving his overworked and abused mother’s burden. There’s no music, but there needn’t have been. The scene was as powerful as it could have got.

I saw Sagara Jalaya more than 10 years ago. Back then I looked for resolution in a film. This didn’t have one, and I remember asking myself, “Why?”

And then I realised: because there needn’t be resolution. Because life doesn’t offer resolution all the time.

10 years later I watched Loku Duwa. When Punna gives up her job, leaves her philandering boss, and writes a letter to her sister, telling her that they’ll all go back to the simpler, happier life they used to live, and when the story ends there, I asked the same question: “Why?”

Sumitra Peries answered that question for me, a long time back. She answered it so well that I am grateful. And happy.

I’m sure others are too.

Written for: The Island LIFESTYLE, February 14 2016

Sugathapala Senerath Yapa: The Man and His Camera

There are quiet and unquiet giants. History invests certain men with enduring appeal, who rise up to become the monuments and statues they are today. But fame is fickle. There are those to whom obscurity is meted out, who didn’t deserve such treatment. To a large extent, I believe this holds true for many filmmakers, particularly from here. And to a very large extent, Sugathapala Senerath Yapa may well be the most well-known among them. As a director of three films and 28 documentaries, his true potential, I feel, has not been properly tested.

Sugathapala Senerath Yapa was born in 1935 in Akuressa. From an early age, he was (in his own words) “boisterous.” Both his parents had died when he was quite young. As a result, he was largely brought up by his grandmother, whom he remembers as a kind-hearted, generous woman. At his first school, Rakvana Maha Vidyalaya, his boisterousness reached (unforgivable) heights when he, together with a friend of his named Abeywickrema, spread a message around school to the effect that the buns served during interval-time were covered with worms.

“Promptly, there was an outcry against the administration of the school,” Yapa remembers, “and later, when the culprits were found, they were brought to Principal’s stern notice.” The misdemeanour got young Yapa expelled and into his second school, Pelmadulla Central College, which was overseen by the “Hela Havula”-famed A. V. Gunapala. “He was kind, but strict. I immediately got his message that none of the antics I had wrecked havoc with at my earlier school would work here. No two words about it, I had to be serious about my studies.” And so he did, getting through his SSC Preparatory Exams.

A quirk of fate, however, would prevent him from continuing his studies. Yapa explains what happened next:

“I briefly considered joining a school near our hometown: St. Anthony’s College. But Father Moses, who oversaw it, told us that I could join it only after one year. I couldn’t wait for that amount of time and anyway, being a boy, I would have frolicked around with other village children, getting beaten up by them at times. So I left school.

“During that time, we had no such thing called a Cinema Hall in the village. The Hall was strictly limited to the city. We instead had to do with Touring Cinemas, which like circuses would come and go to a village.” Considering the tastes of village-folk, at a time when the cinema was considered a frivolous gimmick, Yapa began watching mainly Indian films. “I also managed to see the entire Zorro series,” he remembers. He recollects his first real “job”: painting titles of the films which would be shown in the Touring Cinema. That led to his first tryst with destiny.

The man who was owner of the Touring Cinema at the time was Reggie Perera, Member of Parliament for Lunugala. One day, Perera had been walking along the road, seeing Yapa’s talent displayed. He had apparently enquired after Yapa from some friends of his, who, “given that he was an MP, a species of human beings us village youth were most terrified of,” had fled. Somehow or the other, Perera got to talk with him. Yapa was asked to pay him a visit at his place, which he later did.

“Perera said that he could get me admitted to a school in Balangoda. My grandmother, however, did not like the idea of my going away, so instead he ‘hired’ me as a sort of advertiser for the films his Touring Cinema screened in our village. Following this, he got me free admission to all the shows. I learnt about the cinema from these experiences. I became fascinated with various camera angles, lighting techniques, editing styles etc.”

His second encounter with destiny occurred through a cousin of his. L. M. Perera, a comedian in his time, enquired after him. One thing led to another. Sometime later Yapa was engaged to another Touring Cinema, this time at the ticket counter, as a counter clerk. Following this, he took a clerical exam, which eventually saw him through to a job at the Labour Department.

As was typical of many a youth working at government departments and newspapers, he got himself involved with the arts, beginning with radio dramas. This included an adaptation of Tagore’s Gora. It was through the radio that he managed to meet a future collaborator: Mahagama Sekera. Stints at the radio eventually got him a role in “Kala Pela”, the famous drama troupe which had been founded by another Perera, playwright-cum-filmmaker G. D. L. Perera. “My first raw encounter with the cinema was as an actor in Perera’s maiden film Sama, where I played the part of Sirisena.”

Having become Secretary and Treasurer to “Kala Pela”, Yapa eventually quit it, deciding instead to follow a film career in his own right. A sort of culmination was reached with his first film, in 1969. Hanthane Kathawa remains as fresh a directorial debut as it always was. That this was possible mainly on account of Yapa’s immense respect for the medium can be seen from the fact that he won the Silver Peacock at the New Delhi International Film Festival for his short feature Minisa saha Kaputa (a study of human greed) around that same year.

First-time viewers of Hanthane Kathawa have come out praising its almost completely glitch-free freshness. The “inevitable technical roughnesses of a first film”, as Regi Siriwardena once put it in a critical essay on Dharmasena Pathiraja, can be seen scantily, if at all, in Yapa’s debut. He tells me more by way of explaining this unique characteristic in it:

“I firstly value realism. To me, jitteriness or slipshodness in a work of art is unforgivable. You must value the locale and milieu which you are placing the film in. In the case of Hanthane Kathawa, the locale was a University (Peradeniya) and the milieu that of University students. With regard to not just acting or dialogue, but even to the choice of clothes and to the sense of being at a University through the polemics and arguments students engage in (think “University politics” here), I sought to authenticate my first film.”

Added to this, of course, was the fact of several actors who participated in the film – Daya Tennekoon, Amarasiri Kalansuriya, Swarna Mallawaarachchi – being in their youth. Tennekoon himself was a student at Peradeniya Campus, as was Dharmasena Pathiraja, who helped with the script.

There is no full-stop to talent. The only exception to this happens when forces bigger than an individual degrade it. Sadly, this is the only way by which I can explain what happened to Sugathapala Senerath Yapa, post-Hanthane Kathawa. Pembara Madhu and Induta Mal Mitak, both commercial-minded in a despairing way, never could capture Yapa in the moment of glory which had crowned him in 1969. By this, I am not critiquing Yapa himself. It is a known fact that the Sinhala cinema has never enjoyed the type of balance between commerce and art enjoyed in other countries. Yapa was a victim. Purely and simply.

It has been nearly 35 years since Induta Mal Mitak was released. “Even if were afforded the opportunity today, I would make a film,” he eagerly tells me. He had several unrealised projects, among them Panas Ekvana Akkaraya (The 51st Acre), which apparently revolved around a man who, having already owned 50 acres, tries to acquire one more. It never saw the light of day.

Yapa holds no set theories on filmmaking, but one major thread that seems to bind his thoughts together is the importance he places not on the story, but on how it is conveyed. For Yapa, presentation is more important than, and indeed is to be preferred to, representation.

Occasionally, Hanthane Kathawa itself violates this principle, particularly in certain jarring scenes where songs are relayed, but even with some sequences that still have them – as with those with “Sara Sonduru” and “Diganthaye Ghana” – he lets gesture, feeling, and movement dictate character and plot development. The intensity and anguish of the moment are conveyed through the sequence, an example of songs used alongside cinema at its purest in our country. As an addendum, some of the songs were penned by Yapa himself (in collaboration with Mahagama Sekera) – the lyricist-cum-filmmaker, evidence of his own wider interests, exploring other art-forms without being restricted.

Yapa ends our conversation with a few prophetic utterances. “The way our cinema is going, I can safely say we’re on the verge of bankruptcy. On the one hand, you have religious epics which don’t come even close to the true meaning of ‘cinema.’ They are populists. Next there’s the problem of censorship. I faced it in my own way. Then there’s this band of amateurs who think that by commercialising history – our history – you can get away with any and every flaw committed in the name of winning audiences. Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way.

“This can only be the result of short-sightedness on the part of policymakers, which paved the way for every Tom, Dick and Harry to come forth and make films. The cinema is, to me, akin mostly to religion. You can preserve it or you can desecrate it. By paving the way for everyone, with or without qualification-requirements, you are definitely desecrating it. Dreams have become extensions of reality in the films of some directors today.”

That’s as close to a prediction as any filmmaker can or ever will make in this country. Sugathapala Senerath Yapa, in the final analysis, has a point. A very big one. We’d do well to listen to it.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, February 10 2016